One of the very powerful new additions to Xcelsius 2008 is the ability to create scorecards easily. If we wanted to create scorecards in Xcelsius 4.5 we would need to manually insert trending icons into each row in order to create a scorecard.

In Xcelsius 2008 however we can use a label based menu with alerts. The alerts will act as the trending icons and from there we only need one object to show our indicators.

Here are some simple instructions to create a scorecard.

With calculation contexts in web intelligence we are able to generate powerful reports quick and easily.

Let’s take an example where we have the following dimensions (year, quarter, product) and measure (revenue).

We can easily build a table to represent the sales revenue for each product in that quarter and year.

Now what if we wanted to display the sales revenue in a different context. For example we might want to display the highest quarter’s revenue each year.

You can add an aggregate row that happens after each year and retreive the highest quarter’s revenue from there.

One of the major issues I’ve encountered with Xcelsius 2008 was refreshing too many Live Office components on load from the Data Manager. This would cause the browser to crash when loading the swf.

I’m not sure if it’s a bug but a workaround I discovered was to use a Reporting Services Button to perform the refresh on load. You can find the button in the Web Connectivity components category.

When dealing with a lot of live office objects here are some simple rules to follow.

1. Only use the Refresh on Load from the Data Manager to refresh cells that contain data for objects such as dropdown selectors.

2. Chart data for example that needs to be refreshed on load should be done through the Reporting Services Button

I’ve also attached a Whitepaper from Business Objects that talks about the Refresh on Load from Xcelsius 2008.

Download White Paper

In short, when refreshing on load from the data manager, data is refreshed while the objects are rendering which may cause an overload on the flash player. Whereas refresh on load from the Reporting Services button will occur after all the components have been rendered.

Here is an Xcelsius Example that ranks your table based on whether you want to rank it numerically or alphabetically.

The first picture shows how to rank numbers. As you can see the alpha will come in as ascending order. This can easily be done through your Live Office or Web Service Query. If the data is static you can just go to Data -> Sort in Excel and choose Data Column A. The reason for this is that the Countif function has a bug in Excel where if you execute COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”>” & A2), it will interpret it as COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”=” & A2)

The simple Rank formula for the numeric column that I used takes the rank of each row and spits back the number. It also takes into account if there are duplicate numeric columns. If there is then it uses the COUNTIF($B$2:B2,B2)-1) part to increment the rank accordingly.

Once we have our ranking setup, we have our index match formula that will match the appropriate column to the index.

I’ve attached the source files below that you can reuse for your own pleasure. There are some additional comments in the Excel file that explains more about what is going on for those of you who are curious.

Download Source